The importance of content marketing in digital marketing has been growing significantly in the last few years. Content marketing helps e-commerce stores to market themselves by driving traffic, reach, engagement, and conversions.
A good content marketing strategy can help to increase your store’s conversion rates by up to six times. While this reason is enough to make you require a new strategy, it is not the only reason. Content marketing is becoming more important to brands’ success year after year. For example, more brands are using content marketing to assert their authority in their industry.
This post is a demonstration of how you can build a winning content marketing strategy for your e-commerce store. Success for your brand starts with a great strategy.
#1 Start by Studying your Target Audience and Competitors
When you decide to create a new content marketing strategy, the two most important components to focus on our targeted clients and competitors. Your audience is important because it is the recipient of the content and your product. At this point you should focus on a number of things:
- Find out who the target audience is and where to get it.
- Identify the issues affecting the target audience.
- Establish the best method of communicating with the target audience.
In many cases, one type of content will not be enough to drive traffic and sales. Therefore, you will need to use several of them including videos, blogs, and guest posts.
After establishing the target audience, it is also crucial to find out how competitors are using content to achieve their success. The focus is on establishing the nature of content that competitors use and improve on it. For example, if your competitor is very active on social media with videos, ensure to create better and more engaging models.
Remember that in every type of content, you have to carefully research the right keywords for appropriate targeting. The keywords also help you to focus on different aspects of the target niche.
#2 Make Sure to use Videos on Your Content Marketing Strategy
In 2017, Syndacast reported that videos would become the next big thing in digital marketing. The prediction has come to pass. In 2018, 82% of brands that used videos got high ROI of up to 82%.
According to Hubspot, 50% of website users check for videos before visiting specific stores while 79% prefer watching videos to reading about them.
With these numbers demonstrating the importance of videos in today’s content marketing, the question is, “How do you incorporate videos into your strategy?” You need to understand the different types of videos that are ideal for marketing your store and individual products. Top options include brand videos, explainer videos, and product review videos.
Remember that you can also use the videos on their own or combine them with other content such as articles and guest posts. It is also prudent to provide vivid descriptions and use actionable call-to-action for the viewers.
NOTE: Your videos will deliver better results if you research the target audience, understand the current e-commerce trends, produce the videos professionally, and keep them short.
#3 Optimize the Content for Mobile viewing
The number of people using smartphones has increased tremendously as people shift to handheld devices for regular searches and online purchases. As searches shift to smartphones, search engines have also adjusted their indices in favor of mobile platforms. For example, Google released its mobile-first index that gives precedence to content created for mobile devices.
Your content strategy should be premised on ensuring that the marketing videos, posts, infographics, and other content can be easily viewed via smartphones. You should also create a brand app to help reach your target clients for better engagement with clients.
#4 Push your Content via Multiple Platforms
When creating content, it is important to appreciate that there is no one-fits-all type of posts. This is because the audiences on various platforms are different and adhere to varied cultures. To demonstrate this, we are going to use the videos.
If you are creating marketing videos for the Facebook audience, the platform encourages short clips that are natively uploaded. However, LinkedIn allows longer videos of up to 10 minutes. It is, therefore, crucial to understanding45 where the content will be used.
Your content should be pushed to the target audience through your website, social media, guest sites, and paid sites. This helps to extend the reach, drive more traffic, and generate useful leads for your brand.
#5 Use Content Marketing to Assert your Authority in the Niche
When you create content, one of the primary goals should be asserting yourself as an authority in the niche. Whether your brand is in the fitness, hospitality or any other niche, your content should demonstrate you as an expert that an audience can refer to for solutions.
As a leader, you will be able to attract a lot of traffic as people come to look for opinions while others see you as a source of useful links to grow to rank on social media. From videos to articles, it is important to comprehensively research the ideas being presented and provide solutions to issues affecting the target audience.
Another aspect of becoming an authority with your content marketing is posting regularly. If you only post one video and stay for a long time without adding another, visitors to your website will simply walk away to look for alternatives. Therefore, it is advisable to create quality content and release it regularly to build a community around your brand.
#6 Test the Content Marketing Strategy
After creating and pushing your content to the targeted audience, you need to test whether the strategy is working. First, you should follow the content using tools such as Hootsuite to understand the conversations going around the brand and get instant reports on the content performance.
To know the performance of your content strategy, it is important to test crucial parameters such as reach and engagement. Reach tries to establish the actual number of people who accessed your posts while engagement demonstrated how the content is perceived by the audience.
Other parameters to test include clicks, sentiments, and conversions that arise from the content you posted. By evaluating the success of the strategy, it becomes easy to identify what is not working and initiating changes.
Conclusion
Having a solid content strategy for your e-commerce store is the first mark to hitting your anticipated success. The strategy helps you to look at the e-commerce trends in the market, understand competitors and audience in order to craft the winning approaches for better engagement and conversions.
Remember that even after creating and initiating the content marketing strategy, you will need to regularly review it and make adjustments to improve results.
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